In today's business world, conferencing and meetings involving multiple participants are commonplace. Moreover, business people are often forced to work in teams, as each team member brings a different skill to the team. This fact, coupled with the globalization of business, necessitates that communications systems be able to accommodate multiple participants who may be at different physical locations, far apart from one another.
Electronic mail, or e-mail, is one solution to this problem. E-mail messages may be sent to one, some, or all members in a work group, allowing the work group dynamic to be customized to the task at hand. However, not all participants read their e-mail diligently or in a timely fashion. This often results in delays, as e-mail messages flow back and forth without immediate responses. Also, the quality of e-mail-based multi-party collaboration may result in an inferior work product as people tend to express their thoughts better orally than through written communications, and because the number of e-mail messages increases exponentially as the number of work group participants increases, as does the time spent writing, sending, receiving, and reading e-mail messages.
Business telephone conference calling systems, including video conferencing systems, do not suffer from the communication delays inherent in e-mail systems, as the conferences are in real time. However, like Internet chat rooms, there are no provisions for selective filtering of incoming communications on a per-user basis within the context of the teleconference, particularly as all communications are managed by a common mixer. Thus all participants may speak at the same time and all participants hear all of what is being said. Should two or more participants wish to conference privately, they must invite each other in front of all other participants, and, thus, participants are sometimes hesitant to do this as this is impolite. Similarly, two participants who are in the same room and wish to talk privately must leave the telephone conference and speak outside the conference or outside the range of the telephone. Again, this maybe seen as impolite.
What is needed is a telephone conferencing system that allows multiple parties to simulate a conference room or work group environment within which each party controls who they speak with and who they listen to while maintaining the cohesiveness of the group dynamic.